The Slack Line: Fishing Like a Girl

I have to admit, it’s a little bit difficult to wrap my head around the concept of appealing to the female perspective on fly fishing.  True, the sport wasn’t designed with women in mind, but that makes sense.  Fly fishing wasn’t even designed with humans in mind; the fish, prejudiced little bastards that they are, seem to think that we’re all alike.  By this logic, there shouldn’t be a difference between the way men fly fish and the way women fly fish.  Spending time looking at the sport from the female perspective seems like a dangerous distraction from the ultimate goal of both sexes: catching some fish.  

But then, if girls really looked at fly fishing the same way that guys do, I wouldn’t be fly fishing.  

You see, it took me six years to catch my first fish on a fly rod, and I don’t mean six years of not fly fishing unless my parents dragged me.  I tied my first recognizable dry fly at the age of nine, managed to get halfway through The Compleat Angler at ten, and could shoot a fly into any pocket anywhere by thirteen.  I just couldn’t catch anything—on a fly rod, that is. 

Like a nymphomaniac married to a comatose billionaire, I soon became frustrated and began to look for other, easier places to get what I really wanted.  After my first two fishless summers with a fly rod, I began experimenting, desperate to find something, anything to get the familiar thrill of a fish on the line.  Just this once, I kept telling myself as I tried it all—carp snagging, bobbers and minnows, catfish bait, and even trolling a walleye rig one wild night in Montana.  I don’t remember all the details.  The important thing is that during my fourteenth summer, I began bass fishing. 

Now, bass fishing is a man’s sport.  I don’t mean to imply that sitting on your ass, drinking beer, and swearing at things beyond your control make up the epitome of manliness. The ability to do all three and still haul in gigantic fish every other cast is pretty close, though.  From what I’ve seen, nearly every definition of “manly” involves an easy, definite victory somewhere along the line, and bass fishing was full of easy victories that made my fourteen-year-old ego swell to obnoxious proportions.  In fact, the victories were so easy that they started to lose their meaning.  There had to be more to fishing than throwing a lure out and reeling a fish in, and finding “more” meant that I had to stop being so goddamn manly about fishing. 

And so, I began fishing like a girl.  No, I didn’t develop an aversion to guts and slime, but I did take my eyes off the prize and start doing things that made male fishermen doubt my sanity.  First came the ultra-light rod with the two-pound test on it, which one fellow actually laughed at until he saw the fish I was landing.  Then came reel drag settings light enough to make any fight last for the better part of an hour.  One of my bait-slinging buddies was well and truly horrified by that one and tried to intervene. 

“You’re supposed to just use fie-niece rigs when the fish are spooky,” he told me as I rocked an exhausted largemouth to and fro under the water—she’d fought for twenty minutes, or enough time for my friend to catch two fish of his own. 

“Finesse.  Say it with me, Ty.  Finesse.”  I rolled my eyes as the big girl’s tail began to thrash impatiently once more and her muscles began to tighten in my hands.  “And I’m catching the fish to fight them, not to eat them.” 

“Come on, that’s some fly fishing bullshit right there,” Ty sighed.  

The bass seemed to agree, and rocketed out of my hands and back to the depths with an indignant thump of her tail.  I watched her disappear into the murky pond and nodded.  “Yeah,” I said, a wistful smile forming on my face.  “Man, I haven’t been fly fishing in so long…” 

I wish I could say that I picked my fly rod up again the very next day, and that the fishing gods rejoiced and blessed me with a brown trout that dwarfed the bass I’d been catching.  But that would have been an easy victory, and that’s not what fly fishing is about.  The whole point of fly fishing is to let go of your ego, realize that the victory isn’t as much fun as the fight, make life unnecessarily difficult for yourself, and understand your quarry and how it thinks—in short, to fish like a girl. 

No wonder it’s so difficult, five years and countless hard-earned trout later, for me to figure out the female perspective on fly fishing.  I’m both female and a fly fisherman, so I guess I can’t help myself.  Like finicky fish in remote water, the challenge makes tricky questions fun—if I wanted easy answers, maybe I’d be writing for a bass magazine instead.